Tag Archives: racist

“For decades, the friendly Prairie city has been known for its smiling, lefty premiers, pacifist, Mennonite writers and a love affair with the Jets. Licence plates here bear the tag “Friendly Manitoba.” But events of last fall served to expose a darker reality. The Manitoba capital is deeply divided along ethnic lines. It manifestly does not provide equal opportunity for Aboriginals. And it is quickly becoming known for the subhuman treatment of its First Nations citizens, who suffer daily indignities and appalling violence. Winnipeg is arguably becoming Canada’s most racist city.”

“…a disturbing number of whites manifest something of a repetitive motion disorder—a reflex nearly as automatic as the one that leads so many police (or wanna-be police) to fire their weapons at black men in the first place. It is a reflex to rationalize the event, defend the shooter, trash the dead with blatantly racist rhetoric and imagery, and then deny that the incident or one’s own response to it had anything to do with race.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about sending around those phony pictures claimed to be of Mike Brown posing with a gun, or the one passed off as Darren Wilson in a hospital bed with his orbital socket blown out.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about how quickly those pictures were believed to be genuine by so many who distributed them on social media, even when they weren’t, and how difficult it is for some to discern the difference between one black man and another.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about how rapidly many bought the story that Wilson had been attacked and bloodied, even as video showed him calmly standing at the scene of the shooting without injury, and even as the preliminary report on the incident made no mention of any injuries to Officer Wilson, and even as Wilson apparently has a history of power-tripping belligerence towards those with whom he interacts, and a propensity to distort the details of those encounters as well.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about Cardinals fans taunting peaceful protesters who gathered outside a playoff game to raise the issue of Brown’s death, by calling them crackheads or telling them that it was only because of whites that blacks have any freedoms at all, or that they should “get jobs” or “pull up their pants,” or go back to Africa.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about sending money to Darren Wilson’s defense fund and then explaining one’s donation by saying what a service the officer had performed by removing a “savage” like Brown from the community, or by referring to Wilson’s actions as “animal control.”

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about reaction to evidence of weed in Brown’s lifeless body, as with Trayvon’s before him, even though whites use drugs at the same rate as blacks, but rarely have that fact offered up as a reason for why we might deserve to be shot by police.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial behind the belief that the head of the Missouri Highway Patrol, brought in to calm tensions in Ferguson, was throwing up gang signs on camera, when actually, it was a hand sign for the black fraternity of which that officer is a member; and to deny that there is anything racial about one’s stunning ignorance as to the difference between those two things.

Reflex: To deny that there’s anything at all racial about the way that even black victims of violence—like Brown, like Trayvon Martin, and dozens of others—are often spoken of more judgmentally than even the most horrific of white perpetrators, the latter of whom are regularly referred to as having been nice, and quiet, and smart, and hardly the type to kill a dozen people, or cut them into little pieces, or eat their flesh after storing it in the freezer for several weeks.
….
And the fact that white people don’t know this history, have never been required to learn it, and can be considered even remotely informed citizens without knowing it, explains a lot about what’s wrong with America.”

“A data point from FiveThirtyEight’s coverage of Monday night’s events in Ferguson is worth pulling out. “U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010,” the site’s Ben Casselman writes, “the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.”

That data is from a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and covers October 1, 2009, to September 30, 2010. Over that time period, over 193,000 federal offenses were investigated, about 16 percent of which were declined for prosecution. That leaves just over 162,300 offenses that the government tried to prosecute. And the grand jury decided against doing so 11 times, finding no true bill or a lack of evidence to do so.

This is INCREDIBLY important. I’ve noticed a lot of people seem to misunderstand. The non-indictment was not about a conviction or a guilty/innocent sentence for Darren Wilson. This was about whether or not there was enough evidence to take him to trial in the first place. Had he been put on trial, the odds of him being convicted would have been even lower.

Notice how incredibly rare it is to not grant a case the bare minimum of a trial. Especially in the face of conflicting testimonies and overwhelming evidence that there is more to the story, it’s outrageous (racist) that the Grand Jury would come to such a rare conclusion.

There are a few more routes to justice at this point, although their effectiveness is debatable:

-The Justice Department can press federal charges (they’re being urged by the National Bar Association to do so)
-The Justice Department can bring charges against Ferguson PD
-The Brown family can bring a civil suit against Darren Wilson

(It’s worth noting that many civil rights era cases needed to go to the federal government before anything got done.)”

“The image of a black boy hanging from a rope is in the souls of all of us,” he told them. “It is in the DNA of America. In 2014, our greatest prayer is that this was not a lynching.”

Lennon Lacy was found hanging from a swingset near his home in Bladenboro, N.C. His family have a number of very important questions for law enforcement. I cannot believe how horribly this young man’s death has been handled.

“Call me intolerant, but my view is that, if someone’s reaction to an unarmed black teenager being killed is to announce that he probably deserved it, that person is not someone I’m interested in being associated with, and I won’t miss him or her a bit after I hit “block.” There are too many compassionate and smart people in the world for me to waste even a fraction of my social media scrolling time on interactions with people who are either racist or unintelligent and insensitive enough to appear so.”

“I am challenging white people to consider carefully whether failing to speak out or act because of those fears is justified when white silence and inaction mean the oppression and death of black people.”

Not the best language in terms of ally as an identity, but otherwise some very good points.

This entire story is terrible, and my heart goes out to that beautiful little girl. How do they think all this is going to effect her? Smdh

“Yes, I’m judging the hell out of this entire situation. First, all of this veiled racism is bullshit. Stereotypical attitudes? Circumstances of birth? Wrongful birth? Breach of Warranty? This is about racism and anti-Blackness. We don’t need to avoid those phrases; we need to use them. This is about a white lesbian who was totally fine with her racist relatives and the lack of Black people in her life until she birthed a half-Black baby girl. This is how you can be a white lesbian and not be an ally.”